Sam Biddle

When you think ICBM, things get Freudian—a long, slender missile erupting from an underground silo or submarine bay, gliding upwards. You probably don't consider a giant missile dumped from the back of a plane. The Air Force did.

The outlandish plan actually worked, DefenseTech explains—at least for one daring test. The idea was about as simple as dumping ICBMs from cargo planes go: the missile would float on a parachute until upright, then blast away like normal. As you can see in the clip here, the Pentagon was rightly worried about slow, enormous C-5 Galaxy planes being shot out of the sky en route to target. But! You know, they'd dump the missile beforehand? And then be blown away? Or be blown out of the sky first, crashing to the Earth with its radioactive payload? I'm starting to see why this was never considered past experimental testing. [DefenseTech]